Virginia iGEM Team Reaches Gold in Boston
Congratulations to UVa's iGEM team for reaching Gold, the top medal tier, at the 2014 iGEM competition, held October 31-November 3 at Hynes Convention Center in Boston. The International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition is an annual contest in synthetic biology, a nascent field at the interface of biology and engineering in which designer molecules and cells are engineered from standardized parts to solve global problems.
This year over 2500 students, from 245 universities and 32 countries, met in fierce competition. Virginia iGEM presented Nygone, a waster water biofilter for the degradation of nylon microplastics.
Representing UVa in Boston was Cara Broshkevitch (Biomedical Engineering), Haider Inam (Biomedical Engineering), Joshua Leehan (Biology), Grace Mantus (Biology), Thomas Moss (Biology), Alexander Schmitt (Biology), Matthew Tucker (Chemical Engineering), Michelle Yao (Computer Science), Fangcheng Yuan (Chemistry), and Zi Ye (Biomedical Engineering). Virginia iGEM advisors are Profs. Keith Kozminski (Biology) and Jason Papin (Biomedical Engineering).